Bitcoin Coders Send International Lightning Payment Over Ham Radio

In what appears to be a first-of-its-kind transaction, two developers working in separate countries have successfully sent a bitcoin lightning payment over radio waves.
Organized over Twitter this past weekend, the transaction was sent by Rodolfo Novak, co-founder of bitcoin hardware startup CoinKite, to developer and Bloomberg columnist Elaine Ou. The completed payment effectively moved real bitcoin from Toronto, Canada, to San Francisco, California.
While radio technology is most commonly used for broadcasting music or talk radio, it’s actually capable of much more than that. As the two developers showcased, radio can also be used to boost the resilience of the bitcoin network.
But sending bitcoin over radio isn’t just fun. Some researchers argue it actually has a necessary use case.
The idea is that, while the internet can potentially be censored, it’s not the only form of technology that can be used to send data from one part of the world to another, “in case China decides to censor bitcoin via the Great Firewall, or places like North Korea where there is no internet at all,” as Ou put it in an email to CoinDesk.